Killzone Dev Claims PS3's Cell Processor Is More Powerful Than Any Modern-Day Intel CPU

[Tsing]

"Five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars!" Aside from the (relatively) astronomical price, the PS3 was also infamous for its CPU, which was notoriously difficult to program for. Now, thirteen years after its inception, devs are waxing poetic about the Cell Broadband Engine: in a recent interview with Game Informer, Guerrilla Games's (Killzone, Horizon Zero Dawn) co-director and technical director Michiel van der Leeuw claimed that the Cell CPU is actually more powerful than today's fastest Intel processors. Apparently, nobody figured out how to utilize its full potential.

Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.

 

[Brian_B]

The CIA Air Force did buy up a bunch of the unlocked fat PS3s for cryptocracking...

US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer

(Phys.org)—About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. In addition to its large capacity, the so-called "Condor Cluster" is capable of performing 500...

phys.org

**edit
I thought it was CIA but Googled it... then again, if it was the CIA it probably wouldn't show up in Google Search now would it...

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

128bit processor. Go figure.

 

[Zarathustra]

Look, the Cell CPU was ahead of it's time and a direction in which we could go if we weren't chained by legacy to x86, but to call it more powerful than current gen CPU's is kind of a joke.

 

[raz-0]

You know how I know it isn't more powerful? Because nobody managed to get said power out of it to date.

Theoretically more powerful doesn't buy you ****. Being more powerful at certain things might buy you something. It failed to represent a more powerful option for anything in its lifetime.

Without it being a broadly, and cheaply licensable architecture it would never be good at the one thing key to being a good processor, which is being a defacto standard that draws a lot of developers to making the core useful apps we all need and use.

I have a ps3, it made an ok console. I have the things in my TV, and it makes a horrifically slow to turn on TV.